An increasing number of Public Authorities (PAs) provide or plan to provide electronic public services in an integrated way according to end-users needs. Integrated Public Services (IPS) have been studied in the academic literature however guidelines and roadmaps for PAs are still missing despite relevant European Union efforts, such as the European Interoperability Framework. At the same time, service co-creation is attracting considerable attention. In this paper we outline the aims, methods and pilots of the inGov project. inGov is a 3-year project funded by the European Union under the Horizon 2020 research programme. inGov project aims to merge work on IPS and public service co-creation along with new technologies, particularly mobile and chatbots. The project results will be deployed and evaluated by PAs in four EU Member States.
Acknowledgement: This work was funded by the European Commission, within the H2020 Programme, in the context of the project inGov under Grant Agreement Number 962563 (https://ingov-project.eu/).
The provision of user-centric digital Public Services (PS) is a top political priority for the European
Union. This is evident in eGovernment policy documents such as Tallinn and Berlin declarations
[
PS and IPS design, implementation, and delivery are usually perceived as activities performed
exclusively by PAs. This however tend to change with the introduction of PS co-creation. It is now
widely argued that co-creation can increase PS quality and legitimacy. As a result, governments
increasingly share with citizens the responsibility in PS provision in order to improve efficiency and
effectiveness, increase responsiveness to users’ needs, enhance the democratic level, and restore
trust in government [
Significant research has been performed in the areas of IPS and PS co-creation. These, however, often neglect the European policy context. As a result, there is a need for advancing and combining existing policy and research work on IPS delivery and PS co-creation.
The main objective of this paper is to present inGov, an EU-funded project recently launched to provide inclusive governance models and ICT tools for IPS co-creation and provision.
The rest of this paper is organised as follows. In section 2, related work and motivation for this project is presented and in section 3 the overall project objectives are listed. In section 4, the project components and methodology is outlined while in section 5 the project's foreseen pilots are outlines. Finally, in section 6 conclusions and directions for future work are provided.
For many years, the European Union (EU) is working towards providing policy context and practical
support for Integrated Public Service (IPS) delivery. Relevant strategic guidance can be found in
Tallinn ministerial declaration on eGovernment and Berlin ministerial declaration on digital society
and value-based digital government [
However, these EU policy documents, guidelines and roadmaps cannot fully capture today’s complexity. For example, documents such as EIF and EIRA seem sufficient when assuming that one PA controls all data and services needed for providing IPS. This however might not be the case as data and services are often shared by different PAs while the private sector and NGOs are increasingly contribute in IPS provision.
In addition, a number of co-creation models and methods have been proposed for single PS
design and delivery. Currently, however, we are missing IPS co-creation methods and governance
models where a number of (public) services are integrated and a multitude of stakeholders are
involved with different roles. Additionally, many forms of co-creation copy the ills of traditional PS
delivery, emphasizing divisions of tasks and specialized skills [
At the same time, technology is advancing at tremendous speed. New technologies, such as
mobile communications, chatbots, artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs and linked data provide
new opportunities for IPS in a new world where organisations are more connected than ever before
and constitute parts of global value chains (e.g. [
The inGov project has been designed to overcome some of the limitations listed in the previous section. The vision of the project is to enable European PAs to co-create user-friendly, integrated PS accessible via mobile devices to all, particularly the disadvantaged, resulting in increased adoption, efficiency, effectiveness, trust and satisfaction. The main aim is to support Integrated Public Service (IPS) co-creation and delivery. The focus is on exploiting co-creation methods and the wide adoption of mobile devices to reap the benefits of eGovernment principles.
For this purpose, inGov will develop a comprehensive IPS Holistic Framework that will include (a) IPS governance (structure), (b) IPS agreements between stakeholders (e.g. interoperability agreements, service level agreements, outsourcing, bilateral agreements etc), (c) stakeholders involvement guidelines, (d) implementation and migration guidelines, and (e) an agile roadmap. This framework will enable identifying and addressing relevant legal, cultural and managerial challenges. The framework will particularly support mobile applications and a relevant mobile reference architecture. In addition, inGov will develop a sustainability plan to safeguard the longterm use of the IPS framework and will provide policy recommendations for enhancing existing EU work with our findings.
In addition, inGov will deploy, operate and evaluate these results in four EU member states targeting more than 160,000 citizens. More specifically, inGov results will be deployed in Malta to modernise the digital family household public service (affecting 200,000 households), in Austria to deploy IPS for collecting tourism tax (affecting 3,200 accommodation providers), in Greece to digitise the disabled card renewal service (benefiting 11,500 disabled, low-income citizens) and in Croatia to create AI-driven virtual assistants and services (affecting 32,000 citizens).
Finally, inGov will evaluate citizens’ satisfaction and increase in trust in public institutions and contribute to establishing a culture of co-creation and co-delivery, transparency, accountability and continuous consultation. The project aims to feed its results back to EU policies hence achieving alignment between policies, research and practice.
The inGov main components include [
First, inGov aims to involve stakeholders in all project stages and developments. At the beginning, inGov will elicit the needs of stakeholders in pilots using interviews. Additionally, other methods will be also explored. For example: (a) focus groups discussions or paired interviews especially for engaging with vulnerable/ disadvantaged groups, (b) a two-round participative Delphi interview process, wherein in first stakeholders are asked to provide input (round 1) and then rate this input provided as to their relevance in round 2, (c) at the stage of piloting, living labs may be used, i.e. user friendly environments for open innovation, with an early and continuous involvement of users.
Second, inGov will gather and collect scientific papers and policy documents containing
eGovernment principles relevant to IPS co-creation and delivery. These documents will be coded
and analysed. The final result will be a list of IPS principles properly organised (e.g. as a taxonomy
or ontology). Based on that, CPSV and IPS conceptual model included in EIF [3] will be enhanced to
support IPS co-creation and delivery (e.g. [
Fourth, a novel architecture will be developed capitalising on both established and emerging technologies to support the conceptual work and IPS holistic framework. The development process will be based on an agile model that focuses on 'agility' and 'adaptability' in development. The approach also reflects basic principles of design (science) research methodology. Design research begins by identifying current problems that need to be solved or potential opportunities for improvements in an actual application environment consisting of people, organizational systems and technical systems. Then, it defines the objectives for a solution, designed and develops an artifact, demonstrates and evaluates the use of the artifact, and communicates the results.
Fifth, the holistic framework and ICT tools will be deployed in four member states, which are the
project's pilots. In each case, user acceptance will be evaluated using a new acceptance model that
will be constructed for that purpose based on previous work such as Technology Acceptance Model
[
inGov results will be deployed and evaluated in four pilots. These were selected to reflect different end-users (citizens vs businesses), societal groups ephasising the disadvantaged (disabled, lowincome etc), authority levels (regional vs local) and eGovernment maturity levels. Pilot #1: Modernisation and integration of the digital common family household public service in Malta. Currently, IPS that require accessing multiple registries (databases) are cumbersome to implemet. For example, a recent IPS required the identification of family units in households in Malta for issuing an one-time payment to compensate for the increase of bread and milk prices, as announced in the Malta Government Budget 2020. This task required merging three datasets from three different departments, where each used different schemas and language (English and Maltese). This challenge puts at risk the timeliness of implementation of social measures that a dynamic economic scenario may require and hinders the provision of proactive services. To solve these interoperability issues and administrative burden, it is vital to have the capability of extracting and defining family units within households in an agile manner, where information from various entities will be used in line with specific requirements for the provision of IPS. Through this pilot, the project partners will exploit the co-creation roadmaps, guidelines, governance models, and tools that will be developed in the framework of inGov to modernise this family household PS whilst also taking into account stakeholders input and feedback.
Pilot #2: Creating an AI-driven mobile virtual assistant and a common PS platform for citizens of the City of Bjelovar. The City of Bjelovar is a digital champion in Croatia, offering a range of communal services to its citizens, ranging from social services and getting approvals for benefits payments, to the ability to see every payment from the city budget to any other party. However, while citizens are aware of these services, they are not used as frequently as the city administration hoped. This pilot aims to envision, design, and deliver a universal virtual assistant for PS of the City of Bjelovar that would serve as a platform for existing services but also a framework on top of which all future services would be developed and integrated. This pilot will result in a mobile app developed to interact with existing disparate services and encompassing them in a uniform, simple, accessible, and enjoyable to use experience.
Pilot #3: Reengineering and digitalization of the issuing and renewal procedure of the disabled citizens discount cards for public transportation in the Greek Region of Thessaly. In Greece, disabled low-income citizens, suffering over 67% disability, are eligible for a transport card from the Greek Regions in order to travel free with inner-city public transportation and to pay half price in inter-city public transportation. This process is currently performed with physical visits at the relevant PA offices. The aim of this pilot is to use the inGov IPS co-creation roadmaps, guidelines and governance models as well as the foreseen ICT platform and tools, in order to reengineer and simplify this service in collaboration with stakeholders. Ultimately, this PS will be provided proactively as a cocreated IPS exploiting emerging technologies, especially mobile apps, thus reducing administrative burden.
Pilot #4: The Lower Austrian integrated web-based solution for Public Geolocation Services. The objective of this pilot is to improve a PS workflow and consequently simplify PA employees’ and service users’ everyday work through the use of a web-based solution exploiting geo-spatial data (e.g. tourism tax collection based on the Lower Austrian Tourism Law § 12 NÖ Tourismusgesetz 2010, LGBl. 7400) and mobile communications, in order to provide integrated high-quality services, faster response rates and thus reduce administrative burden. The mobile app, which will be co-created with stakeholders, will recognize the location of the applicant, i.e. the accommodation provider, and subsequently will record the relevant geographical data indicating the location of the service-user.
Integrated Public Service (IPS) co-creation and delivery is particularly important to advance eGovernment in EU Member States. In this paper, aspects of an EU-funded project, namely inGov, is outlined. The overall approach of inGov is to have ambitious goals but also start from existing EU policies and political priorities. inGov is based on four pillars. The first pillar is an enhanced IPS cocreation conceptual model which explicitly supports co-creation and the EU values and principles. The second pillar is an IPS holistic framework that covers all IPS aspects including IPS governance, IPS agreements between stakeholders, stakeholders involvement, implementation guidelines, an agile roadmap as well as a relevant sustainability plan and policy recommendations. The third pillar is the focus on mobile applications and chatbots thus concentrating on mobile devices as main communication channels. The fourth pillar is learning from existing best practices but also developing and deploying new IPS in diverse areas including IPS for social benefits in Malta, for tourism tax in Austria, for disabled in Greece and for informing the general population in Croatia. [3] European Commission, (2017). “New European Interoperability Framework Promoting seamless services and data flows for European public administrations,” available at: https://ec.europa.eu/isa2/sites/ isa/files/eif_brochure_final.pdf. [12] European Commission. (2020). ISA2 Recommendations for organising and governing integrated public services, available at https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/717f26a7-722b-11eaa07e-01aa75ed71a1/language-en About the Authors Efthimios Tambouris Prof. Efthimios Tambouris is Professor of Information Systems and eGovernment at the Applied Informatics Department, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece. Before that, he served at research centres and the IT industry. He holds a Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and an MSc and PhD from Brunel University, UK. During the last twenty years he has initiated, coordinated and participated in several international research projects and service contracts funded by the European Union and the Greek public sector. He is currently the scientific coordinator of the H2020 inGov project. He has served as an expert in standardization activities at CEN and is an ethics expert for the European Commission and ERC. He has more than 170 research publications and is associate editor of Government Information Quarterly (GIQ) and Digital Government: Research and Practice (DGOV) journals. Konstantinos Tarabanis Konstantinos A. Tarabanis is Professor of Information Systems at the Department of Business Administration of the University of Macedonia, Greece, where he has taught since 1994. He is also the Director of the Information Systems Laboratory at the same university. He received an Engineering Diploma in Mechanical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (1983), MS in Mechanical Engineering (1984), M.S. Computer Science (1988) and a PhD in Computer Science (1991) at Columbia University, New York. He was a Research Staff Member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Centre, 1991–1994. He received awards from IBM for his work in the field of 3D printing. He was also the recipient of the Best Paper Award at the 1991 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. In recognition of his work in the field of electronic government, he was the recipient of the Best Paper Award in the eGovernment track at the European Conference on Information Systems in 2000. He served as guest editor of the “Transforming EGovernment” issue of the IEEE Intelligent Systems journal in 2009.